I actually don’t understand the revolving door at some level. By the time politicians retire from office or lose an election, they’re almost always senior citizens. Most of them were independently wealthy before coming to Congress. Why wouldn’t they just ride out their salad days on some homestead, rather than on K Street or Wall [...]

As Glenn Greenwald explains today, we’ve had a good deal of official censorship of the Wikileaks cables, not just in the general sense with Joe Lieberman nudging the site off of Amazon’s cloud service, but in the particular. Several of the most sensitive revelations in not only this but a number of Wikileaks releases over [...]

Earlier I asked if the Catfood Commission will get a bare majority on the panel. Here’s what we know. Judd Gregg will vote for the proposal, as will Kent Conrad. Gregg says he doesn’t agree with everything in the plan but he’d accept it as a “step forward.” This was expected. Remember, initially this commission [...]

Alice Rivlin reports from inside the Cat Food Commission’s war room: A key Democrat on President Obama’s deficit commission predicted on Wednesday that the bipartisan panel would come up with recommendations to shore up Social Security. “The stars are aligned,’’ said Alice Rivlin, a former budget director under President Clinton and now a senior fellow [...]

It’s hard for me to stir up any genuine outrage or praise over the imminent Elizabeth Warren appointment, because I don’t really know what it is, and for that matter, nobody else does. I trust Warren to make the most of whatever job has been offered, but find the best response to be “Meh.” Asked [...]

Speaking of believing lies more strongly, you have a host of deficit fanatics on Capitol Hill who cling to the deeply held belief that tax cuts create more revenue. At least, that’s the only explanation I can come up with for this lunacy: Top Republicans called on Democrats in Congress and the White House to [...]

Yesterday, President Obama made a speech about comprehensive immigration reform that placed the burden on Republicans for coming up with the necessary votes to pass it. Surely they would take that challenge with all the seriousness and sense of purpose you’d expect and immediately rush to the Senate floor to begin work on a bill. [...]

UPDATE: Ted Kaufman and Sherrod Brown release an important bill that would set leverage and size caps on the big banks. The headline story in the Washington Post today states that Republicans, worried about being seen as too close to the big banks, especially in the wake of the Goldman Sachs scandal, are returning to [...]

The financial reform bill in Congress doesn’t have one clear fight, but three. There’s a partisan fight, a non-partisan reality, and a substantive critique. And it’s kind of fascinating to watch these three interlocking pieces at play. To hear top Democrats, they’d have you believe there’s only one fight – the partisan fight. They have [...]

Bob Corker told Good Morning America today that he would be “stunned” if a bipartisan agreement wasn’t reached on financial reform. He should get out his stun gun: Senate Republicans are holding a caucus meeting late Wednesday afternoon on the Democratic banking reform bill, which one senior Republican said the party will unanimously oppose. Sen. [...]

Harry Reid sent a letter to Mitch McConnell today announcing what we’ve all known – that the Senate will move forward with a reconciliation sidecar bill to fix elements of the health care package already passed. The key quote: Many Republicans now are demanding that we simply ignore the progress we’ve made, the extensive debate [...]